On Oranges

Years ago, my wife and I attended a theater show where oranges were rolled onto a stage during a live performance. The actors, still thoroughly engaged in the story — dancing, moving, repeating their lines — struggled to avoid slipping on the oranges. Some, in fact, did, and when it happened, I burst out in laughter. I couldn’t help myself.

Well, my outburst wasn’t well received. Most of the audience turned to glare at me as if I was some Neanderthal who didn’t appreciate good art.

I use this story to illustrate the problem of art. A rolling orange can be one person’s serious artistic statement and another’s comedic moment. Art is entirely subjective, and what constitutes artistic expression isn’t up to us, but the judgment of our audience.

In the art of writing, we use the tools of our craft to relay a story to a reader.

We have nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs; we have intensifiers and modifiers. We have punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraph sequences. We have tools like flashbacks and flash-forwards. We have perspectives like 1st and 3rd person. We might tell more than show. We might have a story of one word, a hundred words, or a hundred thousand words. We strive for eloquence and brevity in our expression and, for some, capture universal themes of the human experience in our writing.

Oranges are our art. How well tell a story is the subjective choice we make as authors to relay how we feel it should be told. When someone judges our writing and experiences our art, they see it through a lens of their own personal experiences and biases. They might not like nor prefer the tools we used to tell it and may score us poorly. If anything, poor use of oranges may diminish our credibility in the eyes of readers, judges, and publishers.

On Cats

Cats, on the other hand. Everybody likes cats. People are obsessed with cats. People share cat pictures all day long. People love cats.

Cats are the bread and circus of writing — they’re stories readers want to read. A cat is what a reader expects when they read your story. Whether or not it’s a horror, romance, or adventure, readers have certain expectations about what that story should feel like. The major scenes. The characters. The action.

I often use the phrase “writing a good cat.” People must be attracted to the story to read it. They must want to pet and cuddle with the story, scratch behind its ears, feel good with it, and ultimately share it with others.

As a writer, my ability to “write a good cat” relates to telling a good story, regardless of the oranges I might have used to tell it.

On Writing Contests

In traditional publishing, we want to write stories with a good balance of oranges and cats.

Our oranges establish credibility with readers and publishers, and our cats compel our publishers to keep buying our stories, and readers to keep reading our stories.

Writing contests, however, are different.

Some contests are more cats than oranges; some are more oranges than cats.

In my opinion, peer-based contests like Writing Battle require a cat-heavy story to be successful. Stories must meet genre and connect with a broad audience of amateur writers. They don’t put as much weight in the oranges we use to tell the story; readers want a good cat. If you fail to tell a good cat, regardless of how beautiful your oranges, it will fail.

On the other hand, prestigious amateur contests like NYC Midnight and GlobeSoup require more orange-heavy stories to be successful. These are contests judged by more seasoned, if not professional, writers, not amateurs. The stories that win these contests must pass a litmus test on how those judges perceive the art. It doesn’t matter how astounding your cat is. You might write a very compelling and attractive story, but if the oranges don’t line up with the expectations of the judges, you will fail.

How You Can Tell

In my opinion, you can tell what a contest is like by reading their past winners.

Orange-heavy contests will showcase slow, dull, prodding stories on typical themes that are expertly told. No risks are taken, and there’s no excitement in the story — it’s all very bland and predictable — we’re bored, as readers, because we’ve read these stories before. But that’s what the judges expected, so it’s what the writer wrote.

On the other hand, stories (art) that are more exciting, out of the box, and fun to read, enjoyed by many regardless of technique, that take risks on art, are more cat-heavy. They’re the surprise hit experts didn’t expect, or, when we read them, may completely disregard traditional oranges. They’re stories that resonate with people, regardless of the tools and techniques used to tell them.

On Cats and Oranges

If we’re writing for contests, we generally have to write a good cat stuffed with oranges, or, as the picture above suggests, a good orangey cat. The story itself has to be compelling and meet the reader’s expectations, and our use of the art must not distract from the story or penalize it.

Now, in my opinion, some writers might gravitate towards one or the other.

Authors might struggle to win peer-based competitions but may excel in writing a predictable story well. They’ll shun the erratic, unpredictable nature of these contests and declare them “not real writing contests.” They’ll upturn their nose and go to where they’re appreciated.

On the other hand, the creative writer who fails in a structured, oranges-heavy contest may be so frustrated by the judges’ gatekeeping that they vow never to pay the $30 entry fee again and go home. They might even pack it in as a writer and give up.

The trick, I think, is found in adapting to the expectations of the contest and being mindful of both problems. At the end of the day, I think most writers would agree that cats and oranges make for better writing. We have to write strong, relatable stories, that people want to hold in their laps, and to do that, we often have to take risks and use our tools in ways that are exciting. Unpredictable. Even if they don’t meet the formal expectations of a literary judge.